By Will DunhamFeb 13 (Reuters) – An elephant’s trunk is essential for most aspects of the animal’s life, from interacting with its environment and with other elephants to eating and drinking. And the roughly 1,000 whiskers covering the trunk are central to its utility, highly specialized for facilitating tactile feedback.New research is providing the best understanding to date of the properties of these whiskers, which give the world’s largest land animals a keen sense of touch that makes up for their thick skin and relatively poor eyesight. It shows that an elephant’s whiskers possess qualities setting them apart from those of other mammals such as mice and rats, from hollow interior chambers to differing levels of stiffness along the shaft.AdvertisementAdvertisement”They constantly feel their way through their surroundings with their trunks, searching for food and exchanging social touch,” said Andrew Schulz, a postdoctoral researcher in biomechanics at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany and lead author of the study published this week in the journal Science. “Each whisker on their trunk acts as a tactile sensory organ, extending their tactile range.”The trunk, a fusion of an elongated nose and upper lip, is densely packed with tactile nerves. Its tip is sensitive enough to feel, pick up and manipulate objects just millimeters in size, like grasping a tortilla chip without breaking it or peeling a banana.When a whisker touches an object, such as a tree branch, that contact bends the whisker and makes it vibrate, which is transmitted to touch-sensing cells called mechanoreceptors located at the whisker’s base.An elephant’s whiskers do not grow back if damaged or lost so it is crucial they can withstand the physical abuse the …
